買い物とウェルカムパーティと食べ物 (Shopping, Welcome Party, and food)

You can tell I really took the time to think of a creative title. The sweat, the tears...

It's been a week since I last posted so I'm sorry I didn't get around to it sooner! Usually by the time I go to my room for bed I'm too dead tired to write. But since it's been exactly a week I knew I had to update today because a week overdue would be unacceptable.

Here goes.

Last week I had just gotten back from a wonderful trip to 四国 (shikoku), and this weekend I had a 3-day break! Only I'm not sure that today would count as the holiday that it was supposed to since I spent about 4 and a half hours at school. 2 and a half day break maybe? Anywho, I'll start on Saturday because that was when the interesting stuff started. Saturday I went to downtown Kumamoto City with the other study abroad kid in my town. It started off pretty slowly (it probably didn't help that we picked the day before a typhoon was supposed to hit us AGAIN. What is it with the typhoons here?) but by the end of the day I felt very accomplished... which is always a good feeling I guess.

We started off in the main square that had a roof on it (a lot of markets/shopping centers around here have those), and somehow we ended up meandering off the main road and ended up in a street with a bunch of much more quaint-looking, smaller and less busy shops. We found a store that had everything priced at 409 yen, final price. EVERYTHING. Which, if you've ever been to Japan, you know that's pretty good. I found a shirt with a raccoon on it and for some odd reason the weirdo within me just had to have it. It's pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.

After our detour to the bargain store we went back to the main street to find FOOD because I was hungry, and I know myself well enough to know how cranky and whiney I can be when that happens. And even though it would've been loads of fun to subject my friend to that, I wanted food. So after some indecisiveness, we settled on this random burger place we found and I got some salsa burger they had. It was TEENY. Granted, I was comparing it to an American restaurant's burger, but it literally took me four minutes to eat, and afterwards I was STILL hungry. We had walked by a donut shop earlier so I demanded that we go buy some donuts, especially since the kid I was with had said how delicious their donuts were. I have a pretty picky donut taste bud (those don't exist, but humor me.) so I didn't have high hopes for this so-called Mister Donut. Let me tell y'all: BEST. DONUTS. EVER. They had some honey glazed donut thing and I think my mouth almost exploded it was that delicious. It was even better that they were having a 50% off sale, so I bought three and my hunger was finally satiated.

We also went to Tsutaya which is basically a giant book/manga/videogame/arcade store thing-y. I FINALLY bought my beloved manga and of course since I was with a dude we had to visit the videogames. After which I was dragged to the arcade (I don't usually do arcades) and ended up enjoying the whole thing quite a bit. We took purikura! Which, anyone that knows Japan is aware of how freaking popular that is. EVERYONE has taken purikura here. What is purikura, you ask? It's basically a photobooth on steroids, if you will. Same concept, with a whole bunch of amazingness added in. You take your pictures in one of these:

You probably can't even tell that that giant black thing with the Via Doro thing is a photobooth. They're massive. And there's so many to pick from. We picked a random one and since he actually knew what to do I was asking every 5 seconds "what's this?" "what does this do?" etc.

That's the inside of the first room (yes, there's multiple rooms). It's SO bright. Like, blinding. There's the camera and the computer screen. That's where you can pick how big you want your eyes to look (yeah), and how much you want it to lighten you. We picked big eyes and the normal brightness. After a very awkward few first shots we succeeded in getting some decent ones. After we took the pictures came the fun part (which I was totally unaware of).

It's insane! There's a touch screen and you can 'decorate' your pictures. This is what we ended up with. Note how much like dolls we look:

Yup. That's basically purikura. Quite the experience, and I definitely recommend it. I will certainly be doing it again, this time with some experience under my belt. Yes, I would say you need experience to be a good purikura taker. These are amateur shots, wait til I do it right.

Enough of the purikura, you say? I can't say there's much else for Saturday. We rode the bus home that night and the man sitting next to us attempted to have a conversation with me in Japanese. I understood about 50% of what he was saying and had a very brief, but very fulfilling conversation about what I was doing in Japan. Hooray!

Sunday was some Welcome Party for the AFSers in the Kumamoto chapter. It was a surprisingly good time. I ended up seeing the German boy I came here with so it was nice to see a familiar face. We were the only two semester students, and the year ones came later for a lunch. There was the boy from up there ^^, and another German (a girl) who have both been here since March.

I had to present my country to everyone (WHAT?), much to my surprise. In fact I had no idea I'd have to until the boy before me was presenting his. It wasn't a total disaster, but I wouldn't exactly call it a total success either. I have so much Japanese to learn it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

Today was a pretty relaxed day... aside from practice. Sigh.

I had odango today! Finally! I'd been waiting to try it!

There it is, in all of its delicious glory. For some reason I was under the impression that it was savory. It's actually soft, sweet spheres (I will not use the word balls in this sentence...) on a skewer. And actually, I think it's the sauce on them that's so sweet. In any case, I grew to like them after the first two; they totally weren't what I was expecting so I was a little weirded out at first.

And then we had Japanese curry for dinner! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh favorite food!

It's seriously one of the greatest-tasting things on the planet. I'm totes stealing my host mom's recipe and taking it home with me.

Yup, that's my uber interesting weekend for you all. Tomorrow if the weather's good we're going to 月見 (moon-viewing) which I'm really excited about so I'm praying for clear skies tomorrow night!

Hope you enjoyed this post; probably considerably less interesting than last weekend (kind of hard to follow that), but I think you have to experience everything firsthand to really enjoy these things. What does that mean? COME TO JAPAN!

I'm awkward and don't know how to end this post, so bye!

-Ellie